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"Put the Book Down and SlowlyWalk Away": Irony and DavidFoster Wallace's Infinite JestIannis Goerlandt aa Ghent University, Ghent, BelgiumPublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Iannis Goerlandt (2006) "Put the Book Down and SlowlyWalk Away": Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Critique: Studies inContemporary Fiction, 47:3, 309-328, DOI: 10.3200/CRIT.47.3.309-328

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“Put the Book Down and Slowly WalkAway”: Irony and David Foster Wallace’sInfinite Jest

IANNIS GOERLANDT

avid Foster Wallace is constantly concerned with irony. It is at the heartof Infinite Jest and constitutes a major theme of his essays and inter-views. In his analysis of the trope, Wallace has centered on two

domains in which irony manifests itself, popular culture (“E Unibus Pluram”)and literary production (McCaffery interview). Irony seems to him “a hatred thatwinks and nudges you and pretends it’s just kidding,” that has “gone from liber-ating to enslaving” (McCaffery 147). Wallace takes a keen interest in the prob-lem of “literary ethics” (“A Supposedly Fun Thing” 287), in the ways that onecan dwell in an “[i]rony-free zone” to speak of “real stuff” (Infinite Jest 369, 592)and maximally to engage the reader. A literary attempt to reinstall this mutualunderstanding between reader and narrator can be found in “Octet,” in which“completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity” (131) is asked of both narrator andreader. But even in Up, Simba! a commentary on media and politics in theMcCain 2000 election campaign, this interest leaps to the eye.

In this article, I address the particularities of the use of irony in Infinite Jest,which require examining closely the contents of the novel: How do the charac-ters present and use irony? A thorough examination of James O. Incandenza’sworks, especially his lethal movie “Infinite Jest,” is crucial. Second, we mustenter the theoretical debate about irony and evaluate the structure of the novelwith regard to its (non)ethical treatment of the reader. My interest lies mainly in

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the importance of “the order of fictional patterns and structures” (Newton 29) forethical positions (Newton’s “narrational ethics” [17]) combined with elementsfrom his “hermeneutic ethics” (19). Both approaches can be summarized in astructural-poetic-performative concept of literature as explicated by ThomasWägenbaur. However, I will start with a thematic-mimetic-representationalanalysis (Wägenbaur 248) and later bridge the gap by means of Hutcheon’s con-cept of “discursive communities” (89–101). I argue that compared with the lethalEntertainment “Infinite Jest” the novel Infinite Jest stands in a completely differ-ent relationship to its audience, and that the lethal Entertainment has two func-tions with respect to its audience, whereas the novel has only one. Drawing oncertain textual markers elucidated by Derek E. Wayne, I show that the novelexplicitly functionalizes the abstract level of “superstructure” (Nünning) of poet-ic texts to counter an ironic reading. I also indicate the consequences that a non-ironic reading of the title have for both the contents of the novel and the aesthet-ic experience of the reader.

Irony in Infinite Jest

To avoid confusion over contradictory theoretical positions, we can regard ironyas either a speaker’s attitude of aloofness or an audience’s impression that aloof-ness is reached through structural manipulation (Hutcheon 41–44).

A first example is Orin Incandenza’s detached demeanor toward his “Subjects.”Marlon K. Baine, whose sister was one of Orin’s girlfriends, states that “[i]t is notthat Orin [. . .] is a liar, but that [he] think[s] he [Orin] has come to regard the truthas constructed instead of reported” (1048n269, emphasis in original). Occasional-ly, we glimpse what could be a sincere gesture,2 but Orin mostly regards andapproaches girls as objects, not subjects. Women let themselves be taken in byOrin because he supplies them with what they want (Nichols 10–11). Baine illus-trates this by discussing Orin’s “fail-safe cross-sectional pick-up Strategy thatinvolved an opening like ‘Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affectthe demeanor of that man,’” which is, of course, “sincerity with a motive”(1048n269, emphasis in original) and—in the end—ultimate detachment. Becauseit is a pose, the girls do not receive what they want: the tokens of affection are nei-ther real nor true but simulated and insincere. Many characters in the novel try topreserve the core of “truth” that Orin and others have come to see as constructed.To grasp the complexity of Infinite Jest, however, one must also know that Baineworks for Saprogenic Greetings, Inc., a firm that deals primarily with “saprogenic”communication—“Gags ‘N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surpris-es and Wacky Disguises” (664). When discourses are “engulfed” and treated in adetached way they are putrefied, which unequivocally is ironic business.

The veterans of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), for whom Don Gately is thespokesperson, are highly anti-ironic. At one AA meeting an “Advanced Basics

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guy, [. . .] painfully new but pretending to be at ease” (367), speaks at a meetingto fulfill the twelfth AA step (“Giving It Away” [344]). He begins, “I’m told I’vebeen given the Gift of Desperation. I’m looking for the exchange window.” Gate-ly notices the irony because not only are the lines “clearly unspontaneous,rehearsed,” but they also commit “the subtle but cardinal Message-offense ofappearing to deprecate the Program rather than the Self” (367). Although AAdemands that newcomers “surrender” and admit that their ego will not save themfrom addiction, it is completely out of place to ironically attack the programrather than one’s ego. Gately lays out the axioms of AA communication:

The thing is it has to be the truth to really go over, here. It can’t be a calcu-lated crowd-pleaser, and it has to be the truth unslanted, unfortified. Andmaximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church.Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity.Sincerity with an ulterior motive is something these tough ravaged peopleknow and fear, all of them trained to remember the coyly sincere, ironic,self-presenting fortifications they’d had to construct in order to carry on OutThere, under the ceaseless neon bottle. (369)

On both occasions that Mario Incandenza visits Ennet House Drug and AlcoholRecovery House, he observes that “people are crying and making noise and get-ting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face andnobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where youcould tell they were worried inside.” That made him happy because it made theplace “real” (591, emphasis in original). Mario liked “true” feelings (190) andstatements that “really go over” (369). He complains that “when [he] brought upreal stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal wasgoing to be very patient about helping him change” (592).

It is fruitful to look at how Hal, Pemulis, James, and Gately think about reli-gion. Mario was correct that some residents of Ennet House could speak aboutGod with ease. Indeed, AA asks attendees “to turn your Diseased will over to thedirection and love of ‘God as you understand Him’” (443). But for Gately, theAA understanding of a Higher Power is still somewhat blurred:

[H]e sort of simultaneously confesses and complains that he feels like a ratthat’s learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in aratty-type fashion and whatnot. W/ the God thing being the cheese in themetaphor [. . .]. He says but when he tries to go beyond the very basic roteautomatic get-me-through-this-day-please stuff, when he kneels at othertimes and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual under-standing of a God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing—not nothingbut Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sortof unconsidered atheism he Came In With. (443, emphasis in original)

The contempt James feels for the “simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma” (689)and Pemulis’s warning that “[s]ome got through by they joined NA or a cult or

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some bug-eyed church and went around with ties talking about Jesus or Surren-dering, but that shit’s not going to work for [Hal] because [he is] too sharp to everbuy the God-Squad shit” (1065–66n321) show that they are enormously preju-diced and not ready to surrender. For Gately may doubt a great deal, but he doeswhat the Program asks of him, going through “the ritualistic daily Please andThank You prayers” (443, emphasis in original).

Gregory Bateson explains that obliterating the ego can be achieved only bydefining oneself epistemologically in relation to a Higher Power, regardless ofhow one sees that Power (332). In that system, prayer is a helpful communica-tion strategy: “The AA use of prayer [. . .] affirms the complementarity of part-whole relationships by the very simple technique of asking for that relationship.They ask for those personal characteristics, such as humility, which are in factexercised in the very act of prayer” (334). Gately can understand the HigherPower as basically Nothing, but that does not obstruct his getting through the day.The ironic, detached approach of the E.T.A. members, on the other hand, rein-stalls the Self and denies Recovery. How can Mario’s seemingly unironic stanceon life be congruent with his having made an untitled remake of The ONANtiad,2

his father’s “four-hour piece of tendentiously anticonfluential political parody”(380–81),3 which is received ironically? The claymation in James’s movie wasmade in Canada, which leads to the assumption that the original movie was nota gratuitous metafictional remake of Reconfiguration history but an “obsessive”pursuit of an anti-ONAN political statement (989n24). Even Mario’s versioncould be seen as partially pursuing that same goal, because “[i]t’s pretty obviousthat somebody else in the Incandenza family [James?] had at least an amanuen-tic hand in the screenplay” (381). The remake was definitely not intended to beironic, as it was first made for “woefully historically underinformed children.”The film became, however, part of “the gala but rather ironic annual celebrationof [Continental Interdependence] Day,” at which it proved “to be way more pop-ular with E.T.A.’s adults and adolescents” than with its originally intended audi-ence (380). At the screening of the film

everyone glycemically mature enough to sit still and watch the cartridge ishaving a rousing good time, [. . .] occasionally heckling or cheering ironi-cally [. . .]. There is much cracking wise and baritone mimicry of a Presi-dent roundly disliked for over two terms now. Only [. . .] a handful of [. . .]Canadian students sit unhatted, chewing stolidly, faces blurred and distant.This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them. (385)

The American audience thus ironizes the instructive and critical film; they knowthe parody is correct in its hyperbolic and grotesque representation of history, butby cheering and “cracking wise” they detach themselves from their nation with-out actually changing anything about the condition in which they live. The Cana-dians condemn this absolution through ironic detachment; for them the clockshould be put back and interdependence dissolved.

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That the United States government also uses this sense of irony is apparentfrom the long transcript of a meeting organized to discuss the introduction of awarning video against the lethal Entertainment (876–83). “Fully Functional Phil,the prancing ass” is chosen to spread the warning; but to avoid his looking likean authority figure, the board decided to “almost ironize the icon” (879–80).4

Before the board has “a look at the sucker” (883), a kind of vision they alsoexpect from the intended audience, the “VICE-PRESIDENT FOR CHIL-DREN’S ENTERTAINMENT, INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT, INC.”(876) adds that there is an “extremely exciting adolescent-targeted version ofFully Functional Phil [. . . in which] Phil engages in a great deal more ironic self-parody” (883). In this way, the board follows the lines about commercials thatWallace established in “E Unibus Pluram.” The audience feels contempt for the“sucker” and indulges in it as designed by commercial strategies.

Don Gately’s take on crowd-pleasing strategies naturally is defined in terms ofthe specificities of an AA audience: “[T]his particular audience does not want tobe supplied with what someone else thinks it wants” (368). AA audiences wantemotions (truth) as unmediated as possible. Both Orin and Hal, however, havestrategies to “deliver the goods” that meet the expectations of the audience. Ratherthan genuinely grieving over the loss of his father, Hal simulates different stagesof overcoming grief to the satisfaction of the professional grief therapist. To pre-pare himself for the sessions, he has “chew[ed] through [. . .] the section for grief-professionals themselves” in the library (254, emphasis in original). Orin’s ques-tion, “But you got through it. You really did grieve” may sound sincere, but heonly wants Hal to “tell [him] what it was like, so [he] can say something genericbut convincing about loss and grief” in an interview (256). Hal and Orin seem tobe suffering from a lack of “final vocabulary,” a set of terms like “true,” “good,”“person” and “object”5 with which to engage in unironic communication:

Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotionsince he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many vari-ables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to sat-isfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a humanbeing—but in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne. (694, emphasis inoriginal)

Orin regards truth as essentially constructed; Hal knows he processes emotionsas a robot or a computer would (that is, through mathematical equations). Thereference to “the self-serving but chilling HAL 9000 computer” (Raizman,“Chapter IV”) in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is apparent (Theuwis 16).Hal realizes the problem can be summarized as a function of the general Ameri-can treatment of “anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool” (694):

Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hipcynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being real-

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ly human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is prob-ably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generallypathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort ofnot-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map,with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of thereally American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it ishe’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment andneed, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia. (694)

This attitude probably explains why Hal’s attempt to surrender and join a Nar-cotics Anonymous meeting fails. The search for and identification with the“Inner Infant” represented grotesquely in the novel give him the creeps: “It’s atthis point that Hal begins truly to lose his willed objectivity and open-minded-ness and to get a bad personal feeling about this Narcotics Anonymous (NA)Meeting” (801). He fears losing the objective stance and fails to surrender his egoin the search for his essence. Instead he “wills himself [ . . .] to stay objective andnot form any judgments before he has serious data, [. . .] hoping desperately forsome sort of hopeful feeling to emerge” (801, emphasis added). 6 With such anattitude, Hal is not ready to surrender, to gain hope through the continual loop ofthe Keep Coming dogma, or to share and Identify instead of Comparing(1001n90).

However, there are some glimpses of Hal Identifying like Mario. Some of hisfather’s entertainments summon emotional reactions:

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains Mario’s favorite of all their latefather’s entertainments, possibly because of its unhip earnestness. Though toMario he always maintains it’s basically goo, Hal secretly likes it, too, thecartridge, and likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat’scharacter on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure. (689)

This thematic-mimetic-representational (Wägenbaur 248) analysis shows us thatthe problems caused by ironic detachment and the inability to empathize arethemes in nearly all the plotlines of Infinite Jest. I plan to discuss next the way inwhich James’s movies, especially “Infinite Jest,” involve the audience withrespect to irony.

The Irony of “Infinite Jest”

Over the years, a lot has changed in the theory dealing with literary titles. Mov-ing from prescriptive (Schopenhauer 594) or discursive anecdotalism (Adorno;Booth 198n25), title theory gradually reached maturity. Lämmert’s comments on“Die einführende Vorausdeutung” (“The Introductory Portent”) (Bauformen desErzählens 143–53) or Hoek’s monograph indicate, far better than earlier margin-al glosses, how the syntactic, semantic, sigmatic, and pragmatic function of titles

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is modeled. Titles stand in a direct metarelationship to content, function (e.g., TheMousetrap instead of The Murder of Gonzago), or structure (Kafka’s Der Proceß)of the text and mediate it toward the audience: “[F]airly often a title providesdirect indications to assess and evaluate the work’s events, theme or meaning,even before the text has enlightened the reader” (Lämmert 144, my translation).

The Medusa v. The Odalisque, one of James’s “audience-obsessed pieces,” isan intriguing example. In it, a theater audience watches “an incredibly violent lit-tle involuted playlet ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque,’” in which both mythicalcreatures are “trying to de-map each other with blades and/or de-animate eachother with their respective reflectors.” The obvious result is that the spectatorsturn to “varicolored stone” after having caught one of the creatures’ reflection(396–97). We might wonder at the movie viewers, who “didn’t think too muchof the thing” as they “never do [. . .] get much of a decent full-frontal look at whatit is about the combatants that supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on therumble’s live audience, and so [. . .] end [. . .] feeling teased and vaguely cheat-ed” (397). Unlike Joelle, who equates the function of the playlet’s audience withthat of the movie’s (740), I am inclined to think The Medusa v. The Odalisquetries to thwart exactly such an interpretation. Duplicating the playlet’s title for thefilm’s gives the movie audience a direct opportunity to scrutinize their own pointof view. Precisely because the movie’s viewers are denied “a decent full-frontallook” (397), the movie’s setup does not replicate the cruel theater spectacle. Onemight even question the idea of indiscriminate verbal duplication: Throughoutthe novel, the italicized movie title is rendered with single quotation marks,which might point out the mediated way the movie is presented to its audience.Stern’s (“Interpersonal ‘Othering’”), Boswell’s (132) and even Joelle’s (741) dis-cussions of the film do not take into account the quotation marks. Of course,Joelle spots what she calls “human flashes” (741) in The Medusa v. The Odal-isque, but she fails to adapt her interpretation to this insight: Her assertion thatthe film’s “only feeling for the [movie] audience [is] one of contempt” (740) thusis incorrect.

Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat compels in a different way: the title’s imper-ative mode invites viewers to join the little kid in waving bye (689). The titleneed not be ironic, for neither the child nor the viewers, who cannot intervene inthe story, can save the ex-bureaucrat; all that is left is gently seeing him off as he“walks into the night.” (It is remarkable that Hal Identifies with the wrong char-acter: he “likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat’s charac-ter” [689]).

“The most hated Incandenza film” is indubitably The Joke (397). On itsrelease, “[t]he art-film theaters’ marquees and posters and ads for the thing wereall required to say something like ‘The JOKE’: You Are Strongly Advised NOT ToShell Out Money To See This Film, which art-film habitués of course thought wasa cleverly ironic anti-ad joke” (397). The title signals that the film is meta-ironictoward an ironic audience: when you do not take the ad at face value, you will be

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ironized through The Joke. The crowds’ discomfort and overt hostility indicatethat they felt victimized. At first glance, this seems an interesting solution for thedangers of victimization through irony, but a meta-ironic stance still employsirony and is not an authentic solution to the problem.

I want to comment on Accomplice! before turning to “Infinite Jest” itself. Themovie is important for its explanation of how an audience can experience a dou-ble bind, because the title fails to make clear the movie’s events (945–47). Whatwe know for sure is that “the boy is sobbing that the depraved old homosexualhas made him—the prostitute—a murderer” (946). Then he “shrieks ‘Murderer!Murderer!’ over and over, so that almost a third of Accomplice!’s total length isdevoted to the racked repetition of this word—way, way longer than is needed forthe audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings”(946). (The word “accomplice” is implied but never actually used in the movie.)One of two things could be occurring: either the boy shrieks at the man, becausethe man has unwillingly murdered himself (with the boy as an unwilling accom-plice), or the boy just shrieks. In the latter case, the shrieks mean that the boythinks that he himself is the (unwilling) murderer, perhaps because he has notstruggled fiercely enough to free himself. In that case, the man is merely anaccomplice against his will. It is impossible to know how the boy ultimatelydecides the question of guilt. Like Hal, we eventually turn to the title: “As I seeit, [. . .] Accomplice!’s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; weend up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridgeitself” (946). The title does not help the viewer untangle the story, which is clear-ly calling someone an accomplice. But is it the man or the boy? Showing thatdouble binds about the meaning of a story can be implemented on a structurallevel seems to be the “theoretical-aesthetic end” (947) of the cartridge.

This insight is particularly useful in analyzing the double bind of the lethalEntertainment’s title. For any ordinary viewer, to watch the movie is to experi-ence “a lethal pleasure-seeking urge to watch the movie again and again and [to]eventually die [. . .] a slow euphoric death. Viewers who have some way or anoth-er been dragged away from their TelePuter [. . .] want nothing else but to contin-ue viewing the film even though they know it will eventually kill them” (Theuwis71). The title is derived from Hamlet’s reminiscence of Yorick, whom he recallsas “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” (Shakespeare 5.1, 176–77;Nichols 6). James Incandenza even called his last production office Poor YorickEntertainment Unlimited because, as his wraith tells Gately, “his most seriouswish was: to entertain” (839, emphasis in original). The ghost explains that thefilm was meant to drag Hal out of his muteness,

[t]o concoct something the gifted boy couldn’t simply master and move onfrom to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce himto open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. Gameshadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, impersonation of professionalshadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody

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compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb ofsolipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle atthe infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and tooth-less mouth open unconsciously, to laugh.7 To bring him “out of himself,” asthey say. The womb could be used both ways. A way to say I AM SO VERY,VERY SORRY and have it heard. (838–39)

Of course, it is manifest that the addictiveness of the entertainment also has anegative side. For an audience that does not know that the film will be “so bloodycompelling” and does not willingly choose to watch it,8 the title is a dark andironic joke: They all but experience “infinite jest.” The relationship between title,content, structure, and effect depends for its meaning on the audience, not on theintent of its maker. Even then, the wraith could simply be indulging in “grossself-pity,” (839) as Gately puts it, and not be speaking the truth. After all, Joellesays that “Jim referred to the Work’s various films as ‘entertainments’ [and] didthis ironically about half the time” (743). In an interview with the Bureau ofUnspecified Services, she states that he “always meant it ironically” (940). Thereis no way to know for sure. The title invariably oscillates between the two mean-ings in its relation to its audience.

Irony, in Theory

A detailed structural analysis of the novel might explain how the title of a novelcan take into account theories of irony. Other scholars have provided completehistories of irony, (for a survey, see Muecke 14–24). My interest is to explainbriefly how irony’s “emotional ethics” (Hutcheon 14) and its victimization alsowork to show how ironic meaning is inferred by what Hutcheon calls “discursivecommunities” (18). Irony’s “emotional ethics“ is mainly significant for puttingcontent in perspective; “discursve communities” are a bridge to the structuralanalysis of the novel. Like Hutcheon, “[m]y concern here is simply with verbaland structural ironies” (3).

Hutcheon observes that “most people feel that there is something [. . .] suspectabout irony [. . .] . The suspicion of deceit that accompanies indirection, espe-cially when combined with the idea of power, understandably makes for a cer-tain unease” (9). Muecke claims that this is a rather recent development, but hetoo acknowledges that irony has an “edge”:

The ironic observer’s awareness of himself as observer tends to enhance hisfeeling of freedom and induce a mood of satisfaction, serenity, joyfulness, oreven exultation; his awareness of the victim’s unawareness leads him to seethe victim as bound or trapped where he feels free; committed where he feelsdisengaged; swayed by emotions, harassed, or miserable, where he is dis-passionate, serene, or even moved to laughter; trustful, credulous, or naïve,where he is critical, sceptical, or content to suspend judgement. (48)

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One can apply that description to a number of the situations with which I havealready dealt. With respect to The Joke, “Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza hadconfessed that he’d loved the fact that The Joke was so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb,” but we also read that Jim said “those rare critics who defend-ed the film by arguing at convolved length that the simple-minded stasis was pre-cisely the film’s aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual” (398). How can thisbe? We must infer that the film ironizes the audience of “art-film habitués,” whothought the ad was “a cleverly ironic anti-ad joke” (397) and came to see the movie.Critics defending the movie are in the awkward position of having seen the moviethemselves: they are part of the ironized crowd, and hence they cannot take James’sstand. Worse, such critics are the ultimate butts of the whole enterprise—they failto see that the only people exempted from the “cutting edge” (Hutcheon 37) ofirony are the ones who took the ad at face value and stayed home.

The problematical speech of the new AA member is another example ofirony’s “edge.” What Don Gately rejects is the aura of smugness hovering aboutthe speaker. An AA speech by definition cannot be “disengaged” (Muecke 48)because speaking at an AA meeting is a “Commitment.” It cannot be “dispas-sionate, serene, [. . .] critical, [or] sceptical” because such attitudes would betraya commitment only to the ego, which must be abandoned to break through theendless cycle of addiction.

Hutcheon also spots the possibility of complacency in irony:

irony becomes a kind of surrogate for actual resistance and opposition. Iro-nists have been accused of smugness before, [. . .] but this time it is the inter-preter too who is not being let off the hook. Even worse, irony is seen bysome to have become a cliché of contemporary culture, a “convention forestablishing complicity,” a “screen for bad faith” [. . .]. What was once an“avenue of dissent” is now seen as “a commodity in its own right” [. . .]. Thisposition is usually articulated in terms of contrast: the “authentic” or “sin-cere” past versus the ironic present of the “total” ironist [. . .] whose use ofwhat is interpreted as a mode of “monadic relativism” [. . .] prevents takingany stand on any issue. (28)9

Infinite Jest comments on this complacency. The crowd at E. T. A. watchingMario’s version of The ONANtiad finds “absolution via irony” (385) rather thanchanges anything. The Fully Functional Phil and The Joke ads also testify to howcommodified and stifling irony has become. Both ads seem to function in theway Wallace has described other ads. Referring to a particular Pepsi commercial,he observed:

The commercial invites complicity between its own witty irony and veteran-viewer Joe’s [Joe Briefcase is Wallace’s generic name for the average TVconsumer] cynical, nobody’s fool appreciation of that irony. It invites Joeinto an in-joke the Audience is the butt of. It congratulates Joe Briefcase, inother words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him, here. (“EUnibus Pluram” 179)

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Hal and Orin represent another version of complacency in the sense of Jameson’s“monadic relativism.” Hal’s dread of his Inner Infant and the nightmares10 fromwhich Orin awakens “with an abrupt fetal spasm, unrefreshed and benighted ofsoul, his eyes wobbling and his wet silhouette on the bottom sheet like a coro-ner’s chalk outline” (47, emphasis added) seem to point out that learning to weara mask of “ennui and jaded irony” (694) is dangerous.

Muecke sees a solution to irony’s “galloping relativism, [. . .] at least in theo-ry, by a call to order in the form of renewed ironic laughter from on high, butmore probably by the practical exigencies of life” (50). However, Infinite Jest’scritique of irony in its comments on “Analysis-Paralysis” (203) and The Jokedefeats Muecke’s first suggestion. His second suggestion, which is similar toRichard Rorty’s theory of irony (93), seems to provide an authentic solution tothe problems of victimization and relativism. However, the only characters ableto hear “the call to order [. . .] by the practical exigencies of life” are AA mem-bers, who also abhor irony.

Keeping in mind Hutcheon’s differentiation between ambiguity and irony(33–36), we can label “Infinite Jest” a classic example of irony. Hutcheon arguesthat we should “stop thinking about irony only in binary either/or terms of thesubstitution of an ‘ironic’ for a ‘literal’ (and opposite) meaning.” She proposesinstead a new kind of interpretation: “If we considered irony to be formedthrough a relation both between people and also between meanings—said andunsaid—then [. . .] it would involve an oscillating yet simultaneous perception ofplural and different meanings” (66). The unsaid may be the “primus inter pares”(66, emphasis in original) of the two meanings, but both meanings are involvedin the semantic value of the irony. “Infinite Jest” is exactly such a title. The spec-tator experiences “infinite jest,” but one can ask whether there should not bemore to a meaningful life than a quest for this kind of self-centered “jest.” There-fore, it is no coincidence that Marathe refers to the “pursuit of happiness” clausefrom the American Declaration of Independence (425). When the viewing isaccidental and not consciously chosen or when screening the film is used as aweapon, the title is especially ironic: The jest of happiness becomes a mockingjest, one that hurts. “The affective response of [the interpreter] in the game turnsout to be just as complicated [. . .], for it too ranges between extremes: from plea-sure to pain, from amusement to wrath” (Hutcheon 41–42). Hutcheon is reluc-tant to call the butt of irony a victim (42), but because the viewer’s response is soextreme, I am inclined to think of the process as one of victimization in McKee’ssense of the concept.

The events and characters in the novel allow us to assert that irony in its vari-ous forms is berated and condemned. Taking into account Hutcheon’s argumentthat irony is most commonly “a strategy of interpretation,” that it is in “the eyeof the beholder” (117, 116), and given that certain ironies are observable only byspecific groups or “discursive communities” (89–115), I argue an option thatHutcheon does not consider: that reading the novel creates an audience that has

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a heightened awareness of both the formal issues and the negative aspects ofirony. However, because irony is observable only with “the presence of a com-mon memory shared by addresser and addressee” (98), a textual memory is con-strued and nurtured during the process of reading the novel, similar to StanleyFish’s concept of “the developing responses of the reader in relation to the wordsas they succeed one another in time” (27). This option need not be in contradic-tion to Hutcheon’s view; insights gathered while reading substitute for the miss-ing preexisting “communal values and beliefs” (Hutcheon 95) necessary to testInfinite Jest’s use of irony. Infinite Jest, “like much of Wallace’s best work, trainsan ironic eye on the misuse of self-conscious irony” (Boswell 183). Such an audi-ence will look at the novel with more suspicion, knowing that if the novel were“one big joke played on us all” (as labeled in “I really wanted to like it . . .”) itwould be inconsistent with its content.

As I shall contend, the novel contains structural aspects that might easily leadto such a conclusion, which would make it a “failure” in my eyes. Therefore, weshould scan the text for “meta-ironic” markers that “signal the possibility of iron-ic attribution” (Hutcheon 154), although, in my opinion, some markers could sig-nal the opposite.

On Construction

Wallace has often emphasized the importance of narrative form. He holds thattelevision’s narrative “strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient—not necessarily even to ‘entertain’—but merely and always to engage, to appealto. Its one, openly acknowledged end is to ensure continued watching” (“Fic-tional Futures” 44, emphasis in original).11 Wallace’s formal consciousness hasregularly affected his fiction, for example, in “Octet,” or the monologic dia-logues in “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”

Looking at the different incomplete descriptions of the film (230, 787–95, 850,938–41, 933n28), one finds no apparent reason to think that some structuralmanipulation of the film causes the continued watching. One could say that thepoint of focus (with Death played by Joelle talking down to an “auto-wobble”lens placed in a crib [939]), which puts the viewer in the position of an infantlooking up and urges sudden Identification with his Inner Infant, is a structuralstrategy. But, by no means does there seem to be a structural analogy to the nar-ratological manipulation of the soap episodes that employ cliff-hangers. What-ever causes the film’s effect seems strongly tied to its content rather than to itsnarratological structure, which explains why a viewer can enter in the middle ofthe movie and immediately become engaged with it. That the Death scene con-sists of “at least twenty minutes of permutations of ‘I’m sorry’” (939) also givescredibility to this interpretation: it is of no importance whether you watch for justone moment or for the total amount of permutations.

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Novels do not operate in this way. Maybe “[i]n theory one can start readingInfinite Jest at a random page” (Theuwis 24), but the average reader will start atthe beginning of the narrative and gradually progress through it (Bal 81–82). Inmy opinion, Infinite Jest structurally exploits the linearity of the reading process.

Many readers, among them Dan Cryer and Michiko Kakutani, have lamentedthe lack of “resolution” or “closure” in the novel. The terms are misleading, forthe end of the story is, of course, in the first scene of the book. The problem isthe presence of a content void, a time gap, which Hager places at the center ofhis argument. For him, the reader must project and speculate on what could havehappened at “the intersection of every character’s and event’s narrative vectors—vectors the novel notes but doesn’t follow through all the way to intersection.” Inthis view, the text seems to thematize Iser’s concept of the Leerstelle (gaps).

The main problem with this theory, however, is that it requires readers to“loop” to the text’s beginning to be able to project a “correct” interpretation ofthe events occurring in the time gap (Wayne, “Chapter III”). Readers must loopnot only because the first scene of the narrative is the story’s last one,12 but alsobecause two passages refer to events that happened during the gap, one retro-spective, one prospective. In the first scene of the narration, Hal describes eventsthat do not happen until after the narrative “end” on page 981: “I think of JohnN. R. Wayne, who would have won this year’s WhataBurger, standing watch ina mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father’s head” (17). The event on page17 strangely links to Don Gately’s dream one year earlier in the story (but morethan 900 pages further into the narrative), in which he “dreams he is with a verysad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up” to retrieve“the important thing” buried inside the head (934). Wayne summarizes the rela-tion between the loose ends as follows:

The searches (for the master-copy of the Entertainment) are, singularly told,temporally linear: Hal’s is a flashback and Gately’s is a foreshadowing. Inconjunction, the visions intertwine in the chiasmic future perfect of story andnarrative: Gately, at the end of the narrative, imaginatively projects a storyevent that has already happened, at the start of the narrative, for Hal. (“Chap-ter III”)

Certain features of the novel’s structure add to the uncertainty of the content, forexample, the function of the notes and the references to the textual void of thetemporal gap.13

I have argued that only late in the narrative—on page 223—can readers recon-struct the chronological order of the story. By then, however, all major charactersand plotlines have been introduced. Readers will then try to reassemble a storyfrom what they have been reading, realizing that they lack certain information tofill in the gaps in the logic between the scenes that have preceded in the narra-tion. The story’s ending is known from the narrative’s start, leaving the readerswith the quest to understand that outcome while progressing in the narrative. In

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my view, the novel puts to use this pursuit of understanding most effectivelythrough the endnotes. Readers are somewhat at ease when they reach page 223because some of the disparate plotlines have reemerged in the narrative, but thissense of relief is reflected in the notes at a more general level. For example, themost interesting note that appears before note 78 (attached to the “CHRONOL-OGY” [999n78]) is the following (994n33): “33. I.e., ‘Before Subsidization’ orthe beginning of the subsidized O.N.A.N.ite lunar calendar under President Gen-tle; see sub.” We might at first be a bit annoyed that a note is provided for “1989”(81), a time reference we can understand but it explains that a different calendaris in use. At an early stage, readers get a hint that more explanation follows (“seesub”), but they might be irked that unlike in other notes, they are not referreddirectly the location of the necessary information.14 But a resolution of the ten-sion is awarded at page 223, which makes the readers believe they will eventual-ly understand.

Also, because of notes referring to other notes that themselves refer to a partof the story that is presented at a later point in the narrative, for example, 985n21.994n39b, 995n45, flash-forwards that provide some extra information occurthroughout the text (especially note 304, which is referred to throughout the text).In this way, readers get the impression that much of what in the story is beyondcomprehension will become clearer in the narration to come. These flash-words,however, are narrative flash-forwards. Normally flash-forwards are constructsthat provide insight into the story yet to be presented. Here, the notes do not con-tain flash-forwards but require readers to establish them by turning the pages andgradually progressing to the actual later stage in the narrative. This is unusualbecause the notes contain information needed by readers later on to understandthe narrative, or even the notes themselves, as note 39b on page 994 indicates.

The reference links of narrative flash-forwards thus establish a textual voidand a blind spot in the reader’s vision. Why else is it necessary to put such ref-erences in the text? We might expect that readers would remember the informa-tion about the actual future had it been given instead of a referring note. Discov-ering a blind spot questions our reading ability, but there seems also to be acontent void because the narrative apparently needs secondary informationthrough the notes. When the same background information is given twice, thrice,or even more often, then we must presume that the text fails to explain itself.Readers are unable to understand this fact until they have finished the novel.Thus, constructing notes reflects the lack of information needed to close the gaps.

The textual status of references to events that happen during the time gap isanother problem. Apart from the fact that there is no logical reason why Gatelycould know what would happen during the gap (even the instigating “lexicalrapist” [832] could not have foreseen this at this point), there is also the odd lastsentence of the narrative, which contains a grammatical flaw: “And when he[Don Gately] came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezingsand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out” (981). Wayne

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spots the “paratactic ‘and’ of unresolved iteration and [the] dangling ‘back to’”(“Chapter III”). They leave us speculating: to exactly what place did Don Gate-ly come back? To himself? To a certain zone (death?)?15 It is by no means cer-tain that the events Hal remembered could have taken place in the textual void.

The quest for the Master Copy of “Infinite Jest” also has to remain unresolved,because it is said to be hidden in the head of James Incandenza,16 which weknow, from page 251 onward, is nonexistent. Gately’s dream reflects this; Hal’sversion of the grave digging does not. This distribution has to do with the narra-tive structure. On the level of narration, Hal can still speak of an existing headbecause we as readers do not as yet know from the narrative that the head doesnot exist. Gately cannot speak of an existing head because at that point readersknow what has happened. On the level of narration, a certain amount of ambiva-lence exists, the head’s status being 0/1.17

Although readers are confronted with a crux in the text, they, nevertheless,have been speculating and projecting wildly on what could have happened dur-ing the temporal void. Theories exist to explain Hal’s strange behavior during thelast scene of the story. He has consumed the powerful drug DMZ that Pemulishad offered him (908, 1065n321); he has seen “Infinite Jest”; or the mold heapparently ate as a child had taken effect.18 To make a “good” speculationrequires rereading the text in search of clues to support one’s interpretation. Thestructure of the novel then becomes a loop, making it into a structurally manip-ulated, enslaving text like Wallace’s TV programs that are designed to “ensurecontinued watching” (“Fictional Futures” 44, emphasis in original). Such an out-come would render its title as ironic as the film’s—which would not please read-ers, who, by reading the novel, have become part of the discursive community ofirony-sensitive readers.

Having scanned the text for “meta-ironic markers,” I will try to indicate howsome structural markers can serve as a counterpart to this ironic construction. Atext as a whole should contain all of its pages. Wayne has recognized this as heconcentrates on “[t]he page after 981, before the Notes and Errata section [. . . thatis] unmarked by text or a page number” (“Chapter III”). That section, althoughwithout page numbers, is part of the body of the text because it is taken intoaccount in the subsequent numbering. Two other unmarked pages (the title pageand the following blank page) also affect the pagination. The title is printed on thetitle page, in tight, thin, bold capital letters of a font different from that of the bodyof the text. Although seemingly a trivial fact, it becomes meaningful when wescan the text to find it again. It reoccurs only once, in the little quarter circle at thebottom of page 981, which is in the same bolder and tighter kind of print.19

Wayne has interpreted this textual level differently. He understands the“incomplete circle” as “the invitation to loop addictively, in the figure of anellipse, to the beginning of the novel (marked with one such ellipse/eclipse)”—as “many time-stamped sections of the novel” have one, with the empty page 982as the locus where the projection occurs (“Chapter III”). He does not take into

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account, however, that the first two pages are also part of the text and that theellipses preceding certain chapters do not have the same size, font or placementas the little quarter circle. Also, Wayne disregards our view of the novel’s struc-ture as a recursive loop. The addictive effect of the text is already there; there isno need for the figure to add to it.

However, if we regard the title page and the quarter circle as dispensations onthe “higher [. . .] textual level,” on which Nünning situates “all those intratextualstructures that can be ascribed neither to the characters nor to the narrator” (23,my translation), readers are provided with a chance to “leap out of the loop” (thequarter circle could be considered as a loophole). No longer are we enslaved bythe structurally manipulated counterpart of the Entertainment. As long as we con-tinue projecting our version of the missing link in the story’s gap onto the blankspace of page 982, we must rewind to update that version, remaining trapped onthe level of narration. Luckily, readers can opt out by leaving this level and situ-ating themselves in the three-quarter circle that is situated outside the novel, or, inNünning’s terms, on the textual level above that of the narration. Readers aregiven the opportunity to realize and accept that the content of the novel is inher-ently ambiguous and to “follow Gately’s lead in overturning anticipation of retro-spection by transforming the novel’s temporal void from a recursive loop into azone of the future perfect: The first scene with Hal, and the void itself, will havehappened” (Wayne, “Chapter III”). Because the (full) circle would have some fea-tures in common with the ellipses that precede some chapters, one might say thatthe key moment of literary reception lies in the fact that to break the loop, readerscan write the missing chapter outside of the narration. This missing chapter, then,because it is situated on the level of the superstructure, will not be a simple pro-jection of ambiguous events but a metacommentary that breaks the loop.

As the colophon unambiguously reveals, the title of the book is in fact InfiniteJest: A Novel.20 As in the discussion of The Medusa v. The Odalisque, this title couldpoint out the difference with the film (the counterpart of the play) and constitute thenovel as novel, consisting of narration and superstructure.21 The title seems to indi-cate that we are reading a novel that has, because of its structure, a completely dif-ferent relationship to its audience than has the movie of the same name.

CONCLUSION

I would derive sincere pleasure in hunting down this Wallace character,wrapping him up in a burlap sack, and beating him senseless with a two byfour [. . .]. I guess in the case of Infinite Jest post-modern means pretentious,awkward, and heartless. Save yourself. . . put the book down and slowlywalk away. (theo@ntli.com)

I have argued that by means of structural manipulation Infinite Jest counters thedanger of an ironic reading—a danger that was imminent because a structure

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analogous to the means by which the film Infinite Jest engages its viewers wouldbe a cruel and ironic joke on the irony-sensitive audience shaped in the readingprocess. Readers can find “the exit” (Theuwis 24, emphasis in original)22 by sit-uating themselves in the three-quarter circle placed outside the narration, render-ing any ironic interpretation obsolete. Forgoing the addictive projection in therecursive loop, readers can finally acknowledge that the novel’s ambiguity(emerging from the passages on the burial of the cartridge, for instance) cannotbe resolved on the level of narration.

Boswell remarked that “Wallace’s work [. . .] has always sought to stave offexhaustion by puncturing holes in its own structure, holes that lead back to theworld outside the text” (199), whereas Burn concluded that “[p]art of Wallace’saim seems to be to break with self-reference and direct the reader outside of thebook” (22). These interpretations are only partly correct; they do not take intoaccount that the “space oustide his work where direct, ‘single-entendre’ princi-ples can breathe and live” (Boswell 207) is initially to be found on the level ofthe text’s superstructure, and not merely in real life: After all, an authentic solu-tion in the field of literary ethics should operate on the specific fictional plateauthat readers cannot “simply master and move on from” (Infinite Jest 839). Thesuperstructural plain is the textual limit, the locus where the infinity of the addic-tive loop can and should be halted. Only at that level can the solution proposedhere be truly part of the novel’s aesthetic agenda, because by analyzing somestriking textual markers it can be demonstrated to be part of the textual strategy.Thus, Infinite Jest probably is the first novel to truly functionalize its beingsnapped shut: readers are given the opportunity to leave the addictive readingcycle by entering their meta-commentary on the level of the novel’s superstruc-ture, after which they experience their nonironic “infinite jest” by slowly walk-ing away after putting the book down.

GHENT UNIVERSITY

GHENT, BELGIUM

NOTES

1. Think of Orin’s nightmares (46), which show what his “truth” might be like, or of his drawingof an infinity symbol (∞) on the bare flank of his girlfriend after sex— a nice and not simulated ges-ture (47) because, as she clearly does not understand it, there would be no point in simulating some-thing that would be lost on the addressee.

2. For a discussion of the content of the film and its implications, see Stern (“The ‘Othering’ ofCanada”).

3. It is quite strange that the filmography claims The ONANtiad only lasts 76 minutes (989n24).Maybe the fictional critics Comstock, Posner, and Duquette (985n24) mixed up James’s and Mario’sversions, for the latter is “way shorter” (381).

4. This was possible because the “demographic target” has a “capacity on Kruger AbstractionScale [of] three or above” (877–78). As is well known, young children tend to confuse irony with

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lying (Hutcheon 66, 122).5. I derive these examples from Rorty 77. In Rorty’s terms, Hal is an ironist who cannot feel the

solidarity provided by irony and thus longs for metaphysical essences. 6. The illusion of self-control is pernicious in AA (Bateson 312–13).7. It is no coincidence that Jim refers to the Inner Infant Hal dreads so much.8. The discussion throughout the book between Marathe and Steeply centers around the amount

of choice actually involved in deciding whether one should watch the film. Choice is apparently notsuch a clear concept. The implied irony is that no one in the formerly American territory can be saidto have a mind clear enough to choose objectively whether to watch it. And naturally, when the Enter-tainment is employed as a terrorist weapon by Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (sic), choice isnot relevant at all.

9. Hutcheon refers to or quotes (in order of appearance) W. C. Booth (A Rhetoric of Irony249–50), T. Lawson (164), B. Austin-Smith (51), T. Gitlin, and F. Jameson (412).

10. There is another dream-like sequence of seclusion and confinement (971–72). The position ofthe passage in the novel (it is very unreal, rather symbolical, and clearly “not one of [Orin’s] baddreams,” although Orin is “in deep denial about its not being a dream” [972]) is not very clear, but itcertainly is a reference to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and even more distinctly to Orwell’s 1984. Themetaphysical state of relativism reached in Room 101 is also the subject of Rorty’s analysis of 1984(169–88). He interprets it as a very dangerous possibility, incongruent with his otherwise positiveinterpretation of irony. What is horrifying is that Marathe, trying to find the Master Copy of “InfiniteJest,” will become the ultimate (demoniac) ironist to break Orin’s last remaining sense of essence.

11. Referring to certain statements in McCaffery (132–38), in which Wallace rejects hollow for-malism, Daverman fights a deplorable rearguard action with Hager over the importance of narra-tive/form in Wallace’s fiction. Daverman states that Hager “makes Wallace the kind of writer he [theauthor] abhors,” because Hager supports “his theory by a very detailed inspection of page numbers,double entendres, and other minutia” and asserting a very complex structure. There is more, howev-er, between “anesthesia of form” (McCaffery 136) and metafiction’s structural “cleveritis” (McCaf-fery 134).

12. The reader realizes rather late that the narrative by no means represents the chronological lin-ear structure of the story. Through the late introduction of the “CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZA-TION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATION’S REVENUE-ENHANCHING SUBSIDIZED TIME™,BY YEAR” (223), the reader understands there is a prolepsis. That the “CHRONOLOGY” ends withthe “Year of Glad” is significant: the first scene is thus effectively rendered as the story’s last.

13. There are, of course, more: think, for example, of the ambiguity the questions of authoritybring about in Baine’s statements, or of the strange episode involving the professional conversation-alist (27–31, esp. 31; 992n24), which “may or may not actually be a scene from It Was a Great Mar-vel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him” (Schmidt, n.pag.).

14. Naturally, the chronological filmography of James’s movies (985n24) provides some of themissing information.

15. The phrase causes a problem even if we take into account the other dangling “come to” con-struction in the novel (819). In the last scenes of Gately’s flashbacks in the hospital, in which he isfighting not to receive any drugs, the question of whether he survives in a sober state is equivalent towhether he is alive or not.

16. Joelle gives additional information on the burial: there was an interment of the tapes (790)along with Jim’s body (940, 999n80) in “L’Islet Province of Nouveau Québec” (789–90). She doesnot say that the “Infinite Jest” Master Copy is buried inside his skull because, of course, she knowsthere was no head.

17. Compare Schrödinger “5. Are the Variables Really Blurred?” (Schrödinger’s Cat, emphasis inoriginal). Schrödinger expounds that such “an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomicdomain [. . .] transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy [. . .] can [. . .] be resolved by direct obser-vation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a ‘blurred model’ for representing reali-ty.” Because a blind spot in the readers’ vision exists in Infinite Jest, no “direct observation” can existfor the content and, therefore, all content-based interpretations remain mere speculation.

18. Compare, for example, Schmidt. Hal has no memory of eating fungus—“this memory was ofOrin telling the story” (953). The second scene makes this perfectly clear (10–11). When Hal answersthe Dean with “Call it something I ate” (10), there is no way to know whether Hal has actually eatenthe fungus and whether he is also trying to communicate this uncertainty. Additionally, it is interest-

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ing that Johnette F. misreads the E.T.A. on Hal’s sleeves as “A.T.E.” (786), which once again couldlead to speculation. All these examples show that interpretations such as Schmidt’s remain mereguesses.

19. Unlike in the two different hardcover versions, the quarter circle is not in the paperback edi-tion.

20. In Hoek’s classification, Infinite Jest: A Novel is a title plus a subtitle in the form of a genericterm and “compared to the main title, the subtitle is situated on a metalinguistic level” (96, my trans-lation, emphasis in original).

21. Compare Hoek: “The meaning proposed by the title is qualified by the co-text, at times open-ly, at times imperceptibly. The title gives direction to the reading of the co-text, the co-text determinesthe meaning of the title; thus, the connections between title and co-text are dialectical” (132, mytranslation, emphasis in original).

22. Note the emphasis Infinite Jest puts on “exits” from the outset: Hal observes that “EXIT signswould look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES” (8).

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